Sea of Thieves is Rare’s riskiest voyage yet, but it’s a huge success

25 big ideas for 2012: Crowd restoration

This article was taken from the January 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

As digital production becomes standard in Hollywood, many classic films are being left to rot in archives around the world. But Mark Cousins, a film writer and documentary director, has a plan to save them from obscurity: crowdsourced restoration, whereby volunteers use their personal computers to return damaged films to their former glories. "Film restoration is incredibly labour-intensive, as the average movie contains 140,000 individual frames," Cousins explains. "But we could take a film, find 10,000 people around the world to jointly restore it, send each of them 14 frames and ask them to erase scratches and increase chroma levels." As with all self-respecting directors, Cousins has a wish list: the 1950 East German film Das Kalte Herz (Heart of Stone), the 1926 Japanese horror Kurutta Ippêji (A Page of Madness), and the work of the great Indian director Mani Kaul, who died earlier this year.